Today's various May Day celebrations and demonstrations in San Francisco are unique. Never before have we seen the labor, immigrant rights, youth, and anti-war movements joined so closely and seamlessly into a coalition that is demanding a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign and economic policies. The messages from the podiums in Civic Center, Dolores Park, Justin Herman Plaza, and the ILWU Hall sounded surprisingly similar and unifying themes, making common cause of their struggles for a more just world that empowers all people, regardless of the artificial borders that separate them.
ILWU made history by shutting down all West Coast ports over a war. Previously, such tactics would only be employed for labor contracts, while the AFL-CIO and other major unions have never voted to oppose a U.S. war. It probably didn't make much of a difference in the prosecution of the war, but it does signal a possible turning point and a coalescing of disparate groups around a set of issues that need to be more forcefully embraced by those in power (are you listening, Madame Speaker?) if they want to remain there.
Yes, it was a beautiful day in San Francisco in more ways than one. We'll have more on what it all means -- including color from the events and reporting on the issues -- in the days to come and in next week's paper.

I just spoke with Assemblymember Jared Huffman, who was concerned about my post the other day suggesting he’d be up for changing the rules for Community Choice Aggregation. I’d parroted a Marin Independent Journal report that said he’d work to change the CCA law so that people have to “opt in” to the power co-op, rather than being automatically enrolled – which is how it currently works.

Huffman said the IJ didn’t put the full context around his quote – he’d only do it if the people in his district said that’s what they wanted, because that’s his job. “I want to be supportive. I represent this district and if the people in this district tell me they want the law changed, then that’s what I’ll do,” he said, adding that no, his constituents hadn’t been asking for him to change it.

But apparently there’s been a lot of hype in Marin over this provision, with the IJ editorializing against it.

Actually, it's more like 200. Kinda lengthy, and a PDF, but here's what to expect from the SFPUC at next Monday's meeting on the issue of building two power plants in the city.

The last time I had lunch at the Slow Club, the check came with a little notice: $1 was added to the cost of every meal to cover the cost of complying with the city's new health-care mandate. That was fine -- if I can afford to eat at the Slow Club I can afford an extra buck so the people who work there can get health insurance.

But it's interesting that the place didn't just raise prices by $1 (which most people wouldn't have noticed -- restaurant prices go up all the time). They made a point of letting everyone know that the money was for a new government mandate. It was, in its own way, a political statement: Hey, sorry we have to charge you more, but the city is forcing us to do it.

That's made some local activists a bit angry (there's a fascinating little bit on it in the San Francisco Magazine blog -- Sup. Tom Ammiano (who wrote the health-care bill) and labor leader Chriss Romero were eating at 2223 Restaurant on Market, and Romero got pissed off when the tab came with a four percent service charge that mentioned the insurance rule.

I get Romero's point, and we supported the Ammiano legislation -- and as someone who works at a small business that has always provided health insurance to employees and is still getting hit with some serious additional expenses to comply, I understand why the restaurants are trying to make a point about it.

And it's absolutely true that restaurants never do this when other mandates, taxes, fees and expensive compliance rules take effect (you never see it for increases in the minimum wage, for example).

Mild statement or annoying protest? Thoughts?

How is it possible that one of the only major daily newspapers in the United States to show an increase in circulation over the last six months is the closest to up and dying? The San Jose Mercury News added 4,000 weekday copies over the last half-year, according to their most recent figures.

The Merc, once the prestigious gem of the Knight-Ridder chain of newspapers, has undergone heartbreakingly massive staff cutbacks and turnovers of top editors over the last two years. One editor even tragically took his own life. Knight-Ridder was one of the few chains in the United States that aggressively challenged the White House on the war, something they didn’t get proper credit for until much later when Bill Moyers made his triumphant return to public television.

Besides the Merc, everybody’s down in circulation by several percentage points these days: the LA Times, the Chronicle, the Sacto Bee, the Orange County Register. And we all know why, of course. People don’t want to pay for paper anymore. So how could a paper product like the Merc, which is losing all of its talent and enduring the infamous operations consolidations of parent company MediaNews that predictably lead to more boring and error-laden copy, actually be raising the number of people who read the deadwood version at home?

Their circ is up by a seemingly small 1.7 percent, but when you consider the most attention the Merc has gotten lately came from a series of depressing photos portraying the Merc newsroom as a graveyard, this seems like a pretty big deal for the Silicone Valley daily. We couldn’t actually find a good explanation for why their circ is up … anywhere. Folks linked to the news but no one explained the turnaround. We weren't able to reach anyone in the Merc's circ department right away either. They may have blitzed the city with subscription deals, but that seems unlikely if MediaNews CEO Dean “Obama Bin Laden” Singleton, like everyone else, is gravitating toward the Web, even if the Web formula he’s come up with for all of his newspaper holdings frankly looks like crap. I mean really, Dean. The MediaNews sites aren’t nice to navigate or look at. Moyers and Singleton videos after the jump.

San Francisco blazed a new trail back in 2005 when the Board of Supervisors approved comprehensive regulations governing the city's medical marijuana dispensaries, which numbered more than 40 back then. Fast forward to 2008 and not much has changed, with the 33 club operators and city officials still struggling to get these places permitted. On Tuesday, the board will consider a third delay of the deadline, pushing it back to Jan. 19, 2009 which, not coincidentally, is the day after the inauguration of a new U.S. president.

What's the problem? Well, according to my sources and a recent Chron piece, the clubs are facing a confluence of difficulties. Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier's insistence that clubs meet the highest standards of access for those with disabilities has caused club operators to have to develop detailed applications which are then reviewed by the Mayor's Office of Disabilities, which wasn't given any new staff or resources for this new role. And then when club operators are forced to make improvements, to get the building permits they need approval from their landlords, which are freaked out these days after receiving threatening letters from the Drug Enforcement Administration. Add to that permit costs of $7,000 and improvement costs in the tens of thousands of dollars, fear of creating a paper trail for federal prosecutors, and the nature of bureaucracy and it's clear that the problem isn't simply one of stoners who can't get their shit together.

Power tools, light fixtures, house paint, lumber, immigration raids. You can find it all at Home Depot. While everyone else was celebrating the May Day holiday of international solidarity and workers’ rights, a group of undocumented workers were either sitting in jail waiting to hear if they’d be permitted to stay in the United States or they’d already been deported.

Last month, law enforcement officials including the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department and the federal Immigration and Control Enforcement bureau arrested several workers waiting for jobs in front of the Home Depot location on Ice House Terrace in Fremont.

“They detained many of us, leaving only a couple of us behind. From what we know, most of them were deported,” one worker told KCBS April 29.

Just before the holiday, immigration activists from La Raza Centro Legal, the Living Wage Coalition and other groups held a press conference to denounce the raids.

“These are human beings we’re talking about, workers who were simply trying to work and earn a living,” a La Raza organizer said in a prepared statement. “We’re going to find out what happened to them.”

NBC 11 reported that several weeks ago Home Depot called the Fremont Police Department complaining about workers loitering in front of the store and 13 people were eventually taken to the Santa Rita Jail because they could not be properly identified.

*SEE UPDATED RESPONSE FROM RON MALIG BELOW*

A group of local postal workers are hitting the streets this afternoon, Friday, and going postal on their boss who they say won’t stop going postal on them. Okay, that’s not the best way to put it. Local postal carriers say there’s a guy working as a supervisor at the Bryant Annex Post Office in the Mission named Ron Malig who’s simply out of control. This postal boss, they allege, has long abused and discriminated against his underlings, behavior they describe as “obnoxious” from finding ways to punish fellow postal workers he dislikes to claiming certain colleagues are “disrespecting” him.

The highly publicized postal shootings of the ‘90s helped create an unfortunate image of letter carriers. But two union officials from the AFL-CIO’s National Association of Letter Carriers, Golden Gate Branch 214, told us that over the last few decades, their local hasn’t resorted to pickets all that often, maybe a handful of times. Mostly a quiet bunch, says union vice president Bill Thornton, at least compared to the ILWU, which briefly shut down West Coast ports this week on May Day to protest the Iraq war.

“We don’t picket. It has to be a really bad situation,” said Don Limin, a steward for Branch 214.

In fact, the last time Bryant Annex employees did hit the streets was for a vigil in late 2006 when a postal supervisor named Genevieve Paez from the 180 Napoleon St. post office in the Bayview was shot to death execution-style outside of her home in Visitacion Valley. Paez, who Limin said once worked at the Bryant Annex, had been involved in a dispute with another postal employee named Julius Tartt. The next day, Tartt himself was found in a Livermore parking lot dead from what the Alameda County Coroner’s Office declared was a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Police believed Tartt killed Paez and then took his own life.

We're receiving early reports from the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition that federal immigration officials have raided restaurants around the Bay Area and are arresting undocumented workers including in the Haight. So much for our sanctuary city "awareness campaign" that San Francisco launched in April. Limited details below.

*ENGLISH VERSION*
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, May 02, 2008

Contact:
Evelyn Sánchez, (415) 572-0639, evelyn@immigrantrights.org
Larisa Casillas, (415) 640-4557, larisa@immigrantrights.org

ICE Unleashes Immigration Sweeps Against Bay Area Restaurant Workers, Arrests Dozens of Workers
Coalition Urges People to Call Hotline to Get Legal Help

We are calling on members of the Bay Area community to be alert to an immigration police presence in your neighborhoods or workplaces. Today, the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition started receiving reports of immigration police raids, carried out by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE arrested dozens of restaurant workers in El Balazo restaurants in San Ramon, Lafayette, Concord, Pleasanton, San Francisco and Danville. ICE arrests were also reported in Oakland. The numbers of workers detained, which cities, and if only EL Balazo restaurants were targeted have not yet been fully confirmed. Please report the names of any individuals, your co-workers, neighbors and others, who may have been picked up by ICE to BAIRC.

More on the raids including who to contact for help and a Spanish translation of the presser after the jump.

Here’s another example of a restaurant passing on the cost of Healthy San Francisco to its patrons. The lady and I had brunch at the Slow Club in the Mission on Saturday and this is our bill. Healthy San Francisco is the program created by Sup. Tom Ammiano to reach the more than 73,000 uninsured San Franciscans with a reasonably inexpensive form of health insurance.

The program is tied up in federal court right now because restaurants have sued arguing that it’s illegal for local governments to require employers to fund health insurance for their employees, which Healthy San Francisco does. About 19,000 San Franciscans had already signed up for the plan by last week and on Wednesday about 13,000 more were added as local businesses met a deadline for registering with the program.

Part of the idea is that without insuring more Americans, you and I pay for it each time someone who lacks coverage ends up making a costly emergency room visit at a public hospital with a preventable disease, illness or injury because they couldn’t access advance treatment, mental health assistance or any other type of care before they reached a tipping point. This program might actually prove that if the government extends coverage to more people who haven't traditionally received it, we may all save money in the end.

For now, you're stuck with the bill while the restaurant industry sues to ignore the true cost of our robust local economy.

George Davis, the naked former mayoral candidate , was arrested again -- on May Day, no less -- and has reached a scientific conclusion:

"From my field experience with public nudity, I can state that the only people who have emotional problems with public nudity are angry people, excessively authoritarian personalities, and fundamentalist religious nut cases."

Oh, and he thinks Pope John Paul II was a big fan of nudity.

You can read his entire letter after the jump.

Early Monday morning about a hundred citizens gathered in front of City Hall to protest the construction of two natural gas-burning "peaker" power plants in the city -- one at the airport and one in the Bayview/Portero district. Representatives opposed to the plan, from a coalition of 20 different environmental and social justice organizations, articulated in so many ways that San Francisco should be moving toward green energy and away from fossil fuels.

Then the crowd, about 100 strong, filed inside to speak their minds about it at a Government Audit and Oversight Committee hearing -- last stop for the plan before it heads to the full Board of Supervisors. But 10 hours later, only a handful of people were still in the room when the chance to speak was finally given.

The insanely long hearing had a loaded agenda, with topics ranging from funding the airport to defunding Edgewood foster care center, not to mention six separate bits of legislation related to the peaker power plants. The public comment requests were piled high and proceedings slammed to a halt during Item #5 when Stephanie Gates, a rep for Edgewood, fainted to the floor in the middle of her testimony about foster care in San Francisco.

It was well into the evening and most of the audience had left for home or work by the time talk finally turned to the peakers.

Seems that Erin Brockovich is testing levels of methane and hazardous chemicals at a Lennar housing complex in South Carolina. The EPA previously tested the site and claimed all was well, but Brockovich is challenging those results. Hardly the kind of sound bite that Lennar's well-financed Prop. G supporters in San Francisco were hoping for.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimates there were about 765,000 people living in San Francisco last year, down from about 777,000 in 2000. But a pro business non-profit group called Social Compact came out with a study a few months ago that claims our population is closer to 865,000 -- and that we're wealthier than official estimates because of our underground economy and other factors -- so Mayor Gavin Newsom has announced that he's challenging the Census figures to try to get us some more money.

“Every San Franciscan counts, and I am serious about ensuring San Francisco receives our fair share of federal
and state funding and attention,” Newsom said in a press release that went out less than an hour ago. “We can use this new data to attract high quality retailers to our under-served markets and make sure we develop the neighborhoods that have been unfairly under-counted.”

Just got a call from the folks over at Uhuru Furniture & Collectibles in Oakland. They're involved with a press conference that will take place today at noon calling on the city of Oakland to deal with a spate of recent aggressive robberies on Grand Avenue. Uhuru endured a takeover robbery on Sunday that left eight customers and two employees short of $1,000 in cash. Silver Screen Video at 3850 Grand Ave. has been robbed twice recently, as has Grand-Piedmont Liquors.

The press conference will be held at Uhuru, 3742 Grand Avenue, in Oakland.

“We recognize that the robbery at Uhuru Furniture & Collectibles and the increased robberies of Oakland businesses go hand in hand with the sharp escalation of desperate poverty of Oakland’s black community,” store coordinator Joel Hamburger said in a presser. “Although we denounce this attack on our nonprofit work, we are calling on the city to respond in a way that will not exacerbate the terrible conditions in the African community but address the root causes of crime and poverty.”

Uhuru Furniture & Collectibles is a nonprofit project of the African People’s Education and Defense Fund (APEDF) that relies on support from community donations. Residents are mad about the robberies, but organizers of today's press conference want the city to respond by improving economic development in the neighborhood.

Among the most fascinating items in a day when the pundits declared the race over, no less than George McGovern told Clinton to drop out and Drudge reported that superdelegates don't want to meet with her: CNN says Dianne Feinstein, a superdelegate and Clinton loyalist, has been trying to reach the candidate for two days and can't get her calls returned.

I saw Hillary on TV last night vowing to fight on, and talking about seating the Michigan and Florida delegations, which would tear the Democratic convention apart and almost hand the election to McCain. But the Clinton campaigning is clearly circling the drain. She's canceled all public appearances today; maybe she's getting ready to do the right thing for the party and call it quits.

Just heard from Mark Leno that Lynn Woolsey, the popular Democratic Congressional Rep. from the North Bay, has endorsed him for state Senate. I suspect Woolsey, like many of us, has come to believe that, for better or for worse, this is a two-person race at this point between Leno and Joe Nation.

Steven Moss, of SF Community Power, an organization that does energy efficiency work with small businesses, sent us an analysis showing we don’t need the peaker power plants.

Check it out. (It’s an Excel file.)

“This is all publicly available data,” Moss told us. “And all the data is right there. People can mess with it any way they want,” he added, encouraging number crunchers to dig into the spreadsheet.

For example, the tab titled “DC Line 72 Trans” was generated “based on Cal-ISO’s claim that 28 percent of transmission is not available,” said Moss. According to their analysis, with the Transbay Cable online, we’d still have a 100-megawatt cushion of extra power.

Moss said the data was collated and crunched by James Fine, an economist for the Environmental Defense Fund, and Richard McCann, of M.Cubed, who doesn’t seem like a slouch either.

Fine told me they did the analysis about a year ago and it came from questioning whether or not the city needed the 400 megawatt Transbay Cable. They assumed we’d have the peakers and factored them in. Now we’re getting the cable but questioning if we need the peakers, so the data’s the same but the question is different. Moss presented this data to the Mayor's office last week. Mayor Newsom's support for the peakers seems to have waned a bit recently.

I've accomplished a difficult feat that may become impossible in coming years: I rented a room in a decent neighborhood in San Francisco for $550. It wasn't easy. Searching Craigslist, spamming my friends, and looking at about 20 apartments over the last couple weeks has been like having another part-time job. And my success story was only the result of finding a tiny room in a rent-controlled four-bedroom apartment where some good friends live.
Rents and the number of apartment-seekers are both on the rise and the number of rental units is falling, a perfect storm hitting low-income San Franciscans who hope to stay in The City.

"The rents are definitely going up on the vacant units, and for various reasons, the supply is declining," says Ted Gullicksen, executive director of the San Francisco Tenants Union. Some of those reasons include condo conversions (which number 2500 since 2003, according to the latest Planning Department figures), demolitions, temporarily rented SoMa condos taken off the rental market, and would-be home owners driven to rent by foreclosures, still-high prices, and fear that they bottom still hasn't been reached (check here for some interesting rental data compiled from Craigslist listings).

Officials at the Golden Gate Bridge are pondering a $7 toll. In early April, we brought you a story outlining why the bridge district was facing a $91 million long-term deficit. Part of the reason is that it operates a transit system that's incredibly expensive. We all love public transit, of course, but the Golden Gate Bridge's bus and ferry system, we discovered, isn't all that efficient. (By the way, it took us a damn long time to understand how the feds crunch transit efficiency figures, but once we figured it out, it made a lot of sense.)

We also showed that the district's overloaded board of directors contained members who received health insurance coverage through the district, but they also obtained it in the towns where they lived and worked as local public officials. One guy even got three layers of health coverage. Inducements to get out of the car, like high gas prices and bridge tolls, in the long run seem like a good idea. But it doesn't look like higher tolls are going to save the bridge district from its long-term debt and organizational problems.

We're getting word of a big standoff going on right now at San Francisco's Jewish Community Center on California Street, where 30 Jewish activists protesting Israel's policy toward Palestinians have blockaded the doors during an event celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel. Police have reportedly shown up on the scene of the "No Time to Celebrate" protest, which also includes another 40 or so Jewish and Palestinian supporters, and arrests are expected.

Mayor Gavin Newsom just returned from a trip to Israel, where he told The Jerusalem Post that much of the criticism by Bay Area residents of Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians and its longstanding military occupation of parts of Syria, Lebanon and Egypt was simply anti-Semitism, something these Semitic anti-war activists just might take issue with.

Editor & Publisher is reporting that the San Francisco Examiner will be creating a Sunday edition of the paper and also expanding its Thursday edition. Right now it's published six days a week. It will also be scaling back home delivery of the free paper -- residents have been enraged over them piling up on their porches -- to Thursday and Sunday.

It seems odd that a newspaper company would be growing its deadwood edition when so many dailies are laying people off and trimming back operating expenses. But one theory says that the Examiner papers, which are also available in Washington and Baltimore, are popular even among younger readers because they're free, easy to pick up on the way to public transit and contain mostly boiled down local coverage. The company that owns the Examiner, Clarity Media Group, took over the Examiner in 2004 after the Fang family nearly ran it into the ground.

By Marc Salomon
Sweet turnabout at the Planning Commission last evening. Who of us on the east side can forget the heady days of the dot.com boom, when Willie Brown was running the City like a personal piggy bank for his developer cronies (instead of Newsom who gives it all away and gets nothing in return) which resulted in live work lofts sprouting like bulky tall mushrooms throughout the Mission, SOMA and the 3d street corridor?

The language used to justify these yuppie monstrosities was truly twisted, most of it mouthed by Willie Brown's short leashed then-Planning Commission president Anita Theoharis. The logic went as follows: we need more housing, so let's build live work lofts. We can build live work lofts in the districts zoned industrial, where housing is banned, because live work lofts are not housing. This reasoning enriched the builders while impoverishing the community as lofts were not charged for their impacts like housing because, silly, lofts are not housing.

But things have changed now.

Image from sfgreenparty.org

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi kicks off his campaign for reelection this evening at Yoshi's Jazz Club in the heart of the Fillmore. The Board of Supervisors' only Green Party member is popular in his District 5 -- made up of the super lefty Haight and crime-plagued Western Addition, where Mirkarimi has shown real leadership in pushing police foot patrols and other reforms -- and is expected to cruise to a relatively easy victory.

But today's event carries a far larger symbolic significance: it is the beginning of a long campaign to create a progressive narrative for San Francisco that counters the centrist and fairly superficial approach of Mayor Gavin Newsom. And that's a struggle that will carry through this fall's high-stakes supervisorial elections, into the vote for a new board president in January, and on into the next mayor's race -- all of which could feature Mirkarimi in a starring role.

Judge Marla Miller appeared poised May 9th to finalize a $15.6 million award to the Bay Guardian and to issue an injunction barring SF Weekly from continuing to sell ads below cost.

In a post-trial hearing on the Guardian’s lawsuit against the Weekly and its chain parent, Miller said she was inclined to rule that some, but not all of the damages a jury awarded to the Guardian in March should be trebled. And she said in a tentative ruling that she was prepared to issue an order forbidding the Weekly from engaging in further predatory behavior.

The ruling hit the front page of Sfgate this afternoon with the headline "SF Weekly loses big, again."

Okay, John McCain has yet another problem with his connections to crazy bigoted preachers. Check this out.

My old pal Andy Van De Voorde is back. Village Voice Media, which owns the SF Weekly and is now pleading poverty, managed to fly Van De Voorde and the two top comany executives, Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin, in to San Francisco for the hearing Friday on our lawsuit. And Van De Voorde, writing as The Snitch, has put forward a remarkable work of journalistic whining.

Oh, dear, says Andy; Judge Marla Miller is prepared to accept the jury's verdict after a five-week trial and follow the law by issuing an injunction. Requiring the Weekly to follow the law would violate the First Amendment.

There are a couple of key points that he misses.

One is that courts have found consistently over the years that newspapers, despite their First Amendment protections, are also businesses -- in some cases, big businesses -- and have to follow the same sorts of basic regulations as all other businesses. It costs money to comply with OSHA rules, the National Labor Relations Act, and environmental laws. It's costing the Guardian (and, I assume, the Weekly) a bit of cash to comply with the city's new health-insurance law. Should those laws be invalidated because complying with them means I as an editor have less money to spend on reporters and freelancers?

Be serious.

The other point that he misses is that the Unfair Practices Act, the Progressive Era law designed to keep small business from being destroyed by giant predatory competitors, actually promotes the goals of the First Amendment, which, history tells us, include the notion that a broad variety of voices in the marketplace of ideas make for a healthy democracy.

Preventing one large media company from driving a locally owned competitor out of business is a positive result.

See, the Weekly can whine about the First Amendment all it wants, but a jury found that the 16-paper chain, with revenues of some $150 million a year, that owns the Weekly, was trying to silence a First Amendment-protected local San Francisco voice. The Weekly wanted to shut us down, in part because the owners of the chain don't like what we have to say and the way we say it.

Um, Andy, isn't there a First Amendment issue there?

If the Weekly now wants to whine about the size of the verdict, let me say for the record that we have warned these folks repeatedly, going back more than five years, that they were violating the law. When we first sent a warning letter, we asked for no damages at all; all we wanted was for the predatory activity to cease. We filed suit only because we had no other choice -- and even after years of litigation, the jury found that the below-cost selling continued, up to the moment of the verdict.

And now we have no choice but to ask for an injunction, to do what we tried to do from the start: Make these guys follow the law.

Now the Weekly and its parent, Village Voice Media, have resorted to trying to overturn the Unfair Practices Act and complain about their First Amendment Rights.

Boys: As my late grandfather, the Honorable James C. O'Brien, a New York State Supreme Court judge, used to say, you made your bed -- now eat it.

The Marin Organizing Committee held a rally May 8th in San Rafael that attracted all three state Senate candidates to discuss issues of social welfare in the county. More than 600 people showed up, and by Marin standards, that’s a huge crowd.

Among the top issues: Prop. 98, the horrible ballot measure that would end rent control in California.

All three candidates say they are against 98.

Mark Leno and Carole Migden got to the rally on time. Joe Nation was a bit late. The reason: He had to stop first in San Francisco – at a fundraiser sponsored by some of the same landlord groups that are funding Yes on 98.

That’s right: Nation went and took some big checks from the pro-Prop. 98 landlords, then drove across the bridge for a No on 98 rally.

Lisa Christensen, Nation’s campaign manager, told me that Nation “has been against Prop. 98 from the start, and wears his No on 98 button everywhere he goes.” As for his alliance with the landlords? “San Francisco politics is a melee,” she said. “Some of my dearest friends are passionately against me on some issues, and we work together on others.”

I wonder if he took the No on 98 button off for the landlord party.

Carole Migden got the Bay Area Reporter, which is a significant achievement since the B.A.R. has often tended more toward the moderate side of gay politics:

A sitting incumbent who has a solid record of accomplishment – both for the LGBT community and residents as a whole – should not be driven from office because she has a strong personality or has been gruff at times in her dealings with people.

Mark Leno got the Pacific Sun, the major alt-weekly in Marin, which complains that Migden has been out of touch with the North Bay part of the district:

When she first ran for this seat in '04 she alienated large numbers of local people, including Democrats, at a San Rafael Chamber of Commerce candidates' event and in other actions that made it clear she had little interest in the parts of the 3rd District north of the Golden Gate. While she says she was quietly working on Marin issues, including solving a Sausalito houseboat problem, in the first part of her term, most people saw her as out of touch with Marin. From the time Mark Leno declared his intent to run for her seat, she has been a legislative dynamo on North Bay issues.

Joe Nation's got the landlords.

The San Francisco Chronicle came out today against the plan to build three combustion turbines, known as "peaker" plans, at the foot of Potrero Hill.

But while the editorial quoted both sides in what I agree is a complicated issue, the editors ignored one of the most alient points: The campaign agains the peakers is being funded largely by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company.

Three missing letters, people: PG&E.

PG&E is underwriting the "Close It Coalition," which sounds like a group aiming to close an existing power plant. The problem, peaker proponents say, is that the Mirant power plant that's now pumping carbon and particulates into the air can't be closed down unless the power it produces is replaced, locally. That's what the state regulators are mandating That means significant new generation within city limits. And it means generating capacity that can run at night, when solar panels aren't firing.

PG&E doesn't want the peakers (which would produce about a third less pollution than the Mirant plant does) because they would be owned by the city; that's a step toward public power. The utility isn't worried about pollution or green power; this is a company that owns a nuclear power plant (on an earthquake fault). It's a company that is building its own fossil-fuel plants up and down the state.

No: for the major funder of the no-peakers effort, this is about preserving a power monopoly. Beginning and end of story.

I am dubious about the peakers, too. It's hard to support new fossil-fuel plants in San Francisco. But when you look at who's behind the anti-peaker campaign, the story gets a lot more complicated.

You wouldn't know that from reading the Chron's editorial.

As I predicted, Friday’s campaign kickoff event for Sup. Ross Mirkarimi wasn’t simply about whether he’ll be reelected to the Board of Supervisors. It was the launch of a movement to reshape San Francisco’s political landscape in a way that could maintain progressive control of the Board of Supervisors and propel Mirkarimi into the mayor’s office a few years from now.
Yet rather than relying strictly on a reenergized progressive movement, the event seemed to signal that Mirkarimi is aiming to create a bigger tent that capitalizes on his strength on criminal justice issues, among other domains of the moderates. Notably, those in attendance included two former mayors: Art Agnos (no surprise) and Willie Brown (big surprise, and a strong indicator that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s coalition is fraying).
As Sup. Aaron Peskin told the capacity crowd at Yoshi’s on Fillmore Street, “There may come a day when Ross is the chief executive of this city.”

Gavin Newsom is a mayor who hates to make the tough decisions, and the proposal for three new power plants in Southeast San Francisco is his worst nightmare.

Newsom's own Public Utilities Commission is pushing the plan, and he's backed it in the past. Environmentalists are making a stink about it, and that's caused the mayor-who-wuold-be-green some headaches.

But the major reason he suddenly decided to ask for a delay in the power-plant vote may have nothing to do with environmental issues at all.

Seven lobbyists for Pacific Gas and Electric, led by Travis Kiyota, visited the mayor May 5th and told him that the giant utility would spend whatever it takes to stop the peakers, a reliable City Hall source tells me. Attending the meeting were Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier and PUC commissioner Dick Sklar, the source said.

According to this source's account, PG&E offered to pay for more power cables into the city, for an expensive demand-management program ... for just about anything that would prevent San Francisco from owning its own power plants.

I couldn't reach either Sklar or Alioto-Pier this afternoon. But Nathan Ballard, the mayor's press secretary, confirmed that the meeting took place:

On Monday, May 5, PG&E participated in a meeting to provide substantive expertise in the areas of energy efficiency, demand response and power generation and transmission. Along with staff from the Mayor's Office, Board of Supervisors, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, Department of Environment, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, CA Public Utilities Commission (CAPUC), and the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), we were able to engage some of the most creative and knowledgeable experts in the room together as we work to identify alternatives to the current action plan.

Ballard also said that retrofitting the Mirant plant -- leaving the big privately owned polluter in place -- was "one of the options on the table."

As far as I can tell, there were no public-power advocates in the meeting.

So PG&E is still driving energy policy in the Mayor's Office. How nice.

By Maria Dinzeo
While we've already dubbed Lennar Corporation "the corporation that ate San Francisco," representatives from five Bay Area environmental organizations today held a press conference to blast the corporation for creating Prop. G to gobble up the rest of Bayview Hunter's Point and Candlestick Point.

Esselene Stancil, a resident of Bayview since the 1950's, says this is nothing new. Change is often promised, but it always falls short. "I have seen many changes in the Bayview, and this change is not for us. We have plenty of parks. What we need is to take care of the one's we have. They promise us houses, but there are no houses being built out there that people will be able to afford."

There will, however, be plenty of luxury condominiums, chiefly in the Candlestick Point area, complete with a bridge connecting their wealthy owners with the freeway. John Rizzo of the SF Chapter of the Sierra Club said that Prop. G's plan to build a thoroughfare through Yosemite Slough is just another way of economically marginalizing Bayview residents. "This bridge is specifically for residents of the luxury condos in Candlestick Point so they don't have to drive through the Bayview and look at poor people," said Rizzo.

Rizzo also noted the dubious nature of the Prop. G campaign that promises the Bayview jobs, housing, and a new park. "It's deceptive advertising. Lennar promises the Bayview a park, but what they deliver are 15-story luxury condos and an astro-turf parking lot," he said. "The Bayview deserves real parks, and maintenance of those that already exist."

Said Stancil, "It's just another gimmick that these corporations always have. They are trying to blind us from the truth. But don't let them fool you."

The California Supreme Court has legalized same sex marriage in California, ruling this morning on the case that stemmed from San Francisco's move in 2004 to unilaterally allow gay and lesbian couples to get hitched. This is a big day for Mayor Gavin Newsom (who decided the city should go ahead and issue marriage licenses to everyone, which was by far the boldest and best thing he's done from Room 200), City Attorney Dennis Herrera (who won the legal fight, making California just the second state to extend marriage rights to all Californians), and all residents of San Francisco and California.
The press conferences at City Hall kick off at noon and it's likely to be quite a celebration down there (mixed in with some apoplectic opponents of gay rights, I'm sure), so ride your bicycle on down and help mark a historic day for San Francisco.

The superlatives are flowing in San Francisco today. “What a wonderful, wonderful day,” was how City Attorney Dennis Herrera opened the giddy press conference in City Hall today, a love fest event discussing and celebrating this morning’s California Supreme Court ruling legalizing same sex marriage.
“What a day for San Francisco!” beamed a jubilant Mayor Gavin Newsom, whose decision to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples in 2004 set off the legal struggle that resulted in the most important civil rights ruling in a generation. He told a large, smiling crowd how proud he was of this city, its values, and its courage to push hard for meaningful sociopolitical change.
“At the end of the day, that’s what I’m so proud of, San Francisco and the values we affirm,” Newsom said. “This is a great day for California, a great day for America, and a great day for the constitution.”
It was also a just plain great day, with hot weather contributing to a record-breaking Bike to Work Day. During the morning commute, a city survey counted twice as many bicycles as cars on Market Street, a 30 percent increase from the number of bicyclists last year.
Today is just one of those days when you fall in love with San Francisco all over again, when it feels like we have the power to really lead the rest of this troubled country in a new direction.

Anxiously counting down the weeks until the June election? Visit our new Election Center to listen to candidate interviews and vote for your favored State Senate District 3 hopeful there and on this blog to the right. We want to know what you think!

Also visit our Endorsements Page for our take on the upcoming races.

Henry Waxman, the U.S. Congressman representing California’s 30th District, which includes West Hollywood and Beverley Hills, is spittin’ mad at private contractors in Iraq.

According to CNN, Waxman raged yesterday that the Pentagon allows private contractors to negotiate worker’s compensation without any major concern for competition between insurance providers to make sure taxpayers get a good deal. See, we bankroll workers’ comp for such companies, but the state department, the corps of engineers and other federal bodies that aren't the Pentagon make carriers compete to offer the federal government their coverage.

Meanwhile, insurance providers that sell the insurance to contractors for the defense department, like KBR and Blackwater, who then send us the bill, make huge profits of nearly 40 percent, according to Waxman. CNN quoted Waxman saying that during the last half decade, the four largest private insurers have made almost $600 million in profits through this system.

The official results are still pending, but it looks like PG&E investors may get a little more control over take-home pay for the top dogs at the corporation. That’s right, Mr. Peter Darbee. Me and my 14 shares of PG&E stock are coming after you and your $7,821,073 in compensation.

PG&E investors voting by proxy passed a shareholder proposal that would allow some “say on pay” when it comes to compensation for named executive officers of the company. At the May 14 annual meeting it was announced that 52 percent of proxy voters approved of the resolution, enough of a majority for it to pass, although votes from the couple hundred attendees of the meeting had not yet been tallied. An official count will be released Monday.

UPDATE: May 19, 2008. We got the official word. From today's PG&E filing with the SEC: "PG&E Corporation shareholders approved a shareholder proposal requesting that the Board of Directors adopt a policy to provide the shareholders an opportunity to vote at each annual meeting on an advisory resolution to ratify the compensation paid to certain executive officers. The Board of Directors will consider the approved shareholder proposal."

For all the amazing stuff that emanates from the Bay Area, we have a few disgraceful elements here as well. Bechtel and the Hoover Institute spring to mind, but the worst of all is the fact that the chief architect of the Bush Administration's policy of sanctioning torture is UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo.
Tomorrow during graduation ceremonies for Boalt law school, protesters with Act Against Torture will converge to denounce Yoo and demand the school fire him. Details follow in the group's press release.

San Francisco police officer Michelle Alvis appeared briefly in court this morning to request from a judge more time for her attorneys to gather defense evidence in a case involving charges that she stole cash property from an evidence locker.

Dressed in a gray suit with shoulder-length blonde hair pulled into a ponytail, Alvis until now has mostly escaped press attention stemming from her involvement along with another officer in the shooting death of an unarmed man in 2006.

But the new charges, which appear unrelated to the shooting, have thrust her back into the spotlight even though it will continue to be difficult for the public to learn all that much about the rest of her intriguing career in law enforcement.

That’s because state law specially protects officers from having any details of their personnel files released publicly, including the results of four parallel investigations into the killing of 25-year-old Asa Sullivan, who was shot 16 times by Alvis and a second officer named John Keesor.

We’ve tried unsuccessfully for two years to learn the conclusions of four standard probes into the shootings done by the SFPD’s homicide unit, the internal affairs division, the District Attorney’s Office and the Office of Citizen Complaints.

The recent proposal to close half of the city’s police stations isn’t the first time such a thing has been recommended here. A group of consultants from the East Coast released a report, or "police effectiveness review," May 14 that suggested cutting the list of 10 police districts in the city down to five and placing specialized units, like gang and drug task forces, in the stations closed by the district realignment.

It also said that the northeast and middle sections of the city have high concentrations of crime and need a greater police presence. The Central and Southern stations need to be rebuilt immediately and the remaining eight stations aren’t being used effectively, according to the report. Plus, the workload isn’t fairly distributed. You can imagine that there’s probably a difference between chasing murderers in the Mission and stalking illegally parked import cars in the Marina.

But Guardian editor Tim Redmond reminded me recently that a similar proposal to close down several neighborhood police stations was made back in the early ‘70s, so I called Rene Cazenave of the local Council of Community Housing Organizations who Tim said might remember some of the finer points. Sure enough, despite Casenave insisting that his memory was hazy, he did remember quite a lot.

Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney gave a stirring speech in New York City on Friday that serves as an important reminder of the simmering populist cauldron that the Democratic Party has neglected at its peril. Much of the country blames Democrats almost as much as Republicans for this country's fall from grace, marked most prominently by the Iraq War, empowerment of corporations over individuals, and short-sightly hawkish approach to everything from foreign relations to illegal drugs.

I publicly criticized Matt Gonzalez for joining Ralph Nader's presidential campaign and for offering barbed critique of Barack Obama (comments even our crosstown rival found newsworthy.) And I still believe that Obama can't be perfectly progressive in his Senate votes or searing in his critique of this country's direction and still be elected president in the current media and political climate of the country.

Yet I agree with most of what Gonzalez and Nader say, and with the stances being taken by the new standard-bearer of their old party, McKinney. None can win, and they may do more harm than good this year, but their political critiques are right, and they represent a significant segment of this country that isn't going away. In fact, it may just get stronger and more belligerent once the significant challenges this country faces become President Obama's problem.

So Democrats, from Pelosi and Obama on down, had better think about how they're going to address the points that McKinney -- the former Democratic member of Congress -- makes in the following speech, which I include below in its entirety. Because the people won't be be patient much longer, particularly if things continue getting worse under a Democratic president who isn't willing to challenge this country to finally live up to its rhetoric.

Tom Ammiano, who was just up in Portland, alerted me to this. That city's ambitious plans to let a private company wire the entire area have fallen flat. The job is only one-third done. The company's out of money. It's a mess.

In other words, the critics of Mayor Newsom's old Earthlink-Google wi-fi plan were absolutely right.

Close readers of the Bay Guardian might remember that back in October of 2006, we caught up with a story involving the McKesson Corp., one of the world’s largest wholesalers of prescription drugs based in San Francisco, and a little-known publishing house called First DataBank, located in San Bruno and one of the few publishers of prescription drug prices in the United States.

First DataBank is owned the Hearst Corp., parent of the San Francisco Chronicle. We followed up with a few more versions of the story, but beyond the Wall Street Journal, which broke the first major story about the relationship between the companies as a lawsuit on the East Coast alleging a conspiracy to artificially inflate drug prices winded its way through the courts, almost no one has bothered to report on the subject.

It took the Chronicle’s business section weeks after our stories ran to publish anything on the suit even though the Journal led with the story on its front page when it first went public.

Probably within hours from now, however, you should expect to see more about McKesson and First DataBank at SFGate.com with a new attitude from the Chronicle about the two companies.

That’s because San Francisco’s city attorney announced today that we’ll be the first government entity to sue McKesson for the alleged price inflations in a federal court in Boston where the other suits were filed. The stories we wrote focused on labor unions there that extended drug benefits to their rank-and-file and whose attorneys obtained internal communications from McKesson and First DataBank employees that purportedly showed how the companies celebrated the success of the alleged price-fixing scheme. In San Francisco's suit, First DataBank is not listed as a defendant, but the city attorney describes the company as "an unnamed co-conspirator."

Despite McKesson’s global reach and headquarters being located here in the city, we’ve always been blown away that the local press has spent so little time reporting on them. We’ll post more info as we gather it.

For all those following the latest and greatest in the saga of San Francisco's energy future, here's a copy of the proposal PG&E put before Mayor Gavin Newsom's staff on March 5, and which has been making rounds at City Hall. It outlines (though doesn't go into too much detail) a number of energy efficiency measures, demand-response targets, and transmission upgrades.

Tony Winnicker, spokesperson for the SFPUC, seemed nonplussed by the plan, and said it only slightly differed from a past anti-peaker proposal from PG&E that Cal-ISO found wasn't enough for San Francisco to forgo building two new combustion turbine power plants. The new plan includes a line connecting two substations in Potrero and Embarcadero, ultimately making our local grid a little more dynamic. But, said Winnicker, "There's no indication from Cal-ISO that doing this would allow us to close Potrero without Cal-ISO's consistent requirement of 'in city, dispatchable, reliable' generation."

Cal-ISO's Gregg Fishman said the new proposal had pros and cons they'd have to weigh, and introducing a new plan at this point could mean more delays on closing Mirant. "One drawback to a transmission alternative is that building a new major transmission project, instead of installing the peakers, will mean potentially years of delay in the closure of the highly polluting Potrero. Additionally, any new in-city resources, including demand response, would need to be available “around-the-clock” to meet national reliability standards the ISO is required to uphold. Currently, demand response is not available 24/7."

Don't know about you, but my Mission district mailbox has been bombarded by scary mailers from PG&E, posing as the Close It Coalition, screaming "NO NEW POWER PLANTS." They claim environmental reasons but one inside source told me PG&E is "paranoid" about public power. Their 2007 annual report to shareholders includes a section detailing the risks of loosing customers to Community Choice Aggregation or municipalization of electricity services. (See pages 74-76 of this document. I also recommend page 56 for details on the fossil fuel burning power plants PG&E is also building, that are bigger and dirtier than the city's would be.) Peter Darbee, CEO of the corporation, also expressed his own personal concern about public power at PG&E's May 14 annual meeting (but you'll have to tune into tomorrow's Guardian for details on that.)

On May 12, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, founder of Waterkeeper, senior counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and as big a wig as Al Gore in the environmental hall of fame, decided to weigh in on San Francisco's plan to build two fossil fuel-burning power plants. He sent this letter to the Board of Supervisors, Mayor Gavin Newsom, the CPUC's Mike Peevey, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, urging them to back away from a future hooked to fossil fuels.

"Given the size and impact of this project, I respectfully urge you to listen to the public interest and environmental groups such as Sierra Club and SPUR that are calling for an independent study to determine whether these power plants are truly required in 2008," Kennedy wrote.

But, lest you get confused about how emphatically concerned an eco-heavy-hitter like NRDC is about San Francisco's energy future, the group sent another letter three days later saying they don't have a position on the controversial issue, and don't plan on taking one. That letter was signed by Ralph Cavanagh, who handles energy issues for NRDC and has been a champion of decoupling -- which utility companies love because it separates the profit-making from the energy-consuming, thus ensuring they still take home a pretty penny while encouraging customers to cut back on energy use.

Craig Noble, spokesperson for NRDC, explained the discrepancy by email, writing, "Bobby wasn’t representing NRDC in his official capacity when he took a position on that particular project. It was unclear to some people that he was speaking as a private citizen, so NRDC released a letter of clarification – we have not looked at this project and therefore have not taken a position." He also wrote they probably wouldn't, as they tend to focus on broader policy issues rather than individual projects.

A number of environmental and social justice groups have also allied against San Francisco's plan to build the peakers, strongly urging city officials to step it up with renewables rather than natural gas, and sending letters with their eco-group stamps all over them. They also met with Newsom to express alternatives to the peakers, according to Josh Arce of Brightline Defense, one of the leaders of the environmental front.

But it wasn't until Newsom's staff met with PG&E, the quiet giant of the anti-peaker movement, that the Mayor put the brakes on the power plant's approval process. After that meeting, Newsom intervened last week at the Board of Supervisors, temporarily pausing the approval process of the peaker plan while he called for the exploration of other alternatives.

At the May 20 meeting, the Board of Supervisors agreed to a two-week hold on a plan to build two combustion turbine “peaker” power plants in the city. (Also known as the CTs.) The delayed legislation was also amended by Sup. Sean Elsbernd, who injected a 90-day due diligence period into the process.

Translation: if the Board, two weeks from now, passes the plan to build the peakers, a 90-day due diligence period kicks in. And if, during that period, the SFPUC general manager finds that another plan meets a certain list of criteria (which are included in the amendments and can be read here), then he can kill the city’s peaker plan and put forth the alternative. The alternative would still have to go through all the permitting and planning processes that the city’s peakers have already weathered, but the city’s peaker project would be dead.

Elsbernd’s amendments contain a list of qualifications that any alternative must meet, including an agreement that Mirant’s Unit 3 would still close (so the company can redevelop that site for some other profitable commercial use), and that any other “proposed project” would improve environmental quality and city control over energy supplies.

The language here is pretty careful: nowhere does it say that a new proposal must be as clean, if not cleaner, than the city’s peakers. Nor does it say it must be owned by the city.

Elsbernd asked for the two week continuance when introducing the amendments, to give the Board more time to get comfortable with them and "to make sure that the CTs are either the right thing or the wrong thing."

Peskin, describing the motion before them, jabbed that the extra time was for any possible alternative "proposed by PG&E and/or Mirant."

To which Elsbernd took issue, "Actually, I would disagree with your statement," he said. "This is not a proposal from PG&E."

After the item passed, with Sup. Chris Daly citing it as a delay tactic and dissenting, Elsbernd told the Guardian the amendments did not come from the Mayor's staff. "They came from my pretty little head," he said. "I asked the city attorney to draft them for me."

Photo courtesy of Governor's Office
By Janna Brancolini
The Environmental Defense Fund’s San Francisco office hosted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today to recognize five California companies and a host of green business practices identified in a new EDF report called “Innovations Review: Making Green the New Business as Usual.”

The EDF said the purpose of the report was to identity business innovations that are good for both the environment and a company’s bottom line. They said they hope other companies will consider emulating these green practices.

Schwarzenegger said the companies being recognized have realized that “business as usual was changing” and starting doing things such as powering headquarters with renewable energy, running shuttle buses to cut down on the number of employees commuting to work and implementing communications systems that use a fraction of the energy of normal equipment.

Schwarzenegger said that about a third of the more than 50 companies discussed in the report are based in California and said, “We are inspiring other states, and we are inspiring the country.”

Check out who's spending money supporting Joe Nation: A group called the Civil Justice Association of California. As Calitics notes:

A group like this does not spend a quarter million on a politician without expecting something in return. What does this anti-consumer organization expect in return? You need look no further than their own description: "Industry-sponsored California group, advocating legal reforms to restrict tort recovery."

You can find out more about this group at its website, but Calitics has it right: This is an organization that wants to protect big businesses (particularly, these days, Big Pharma) from liability suits.

In case anyone was still wondering if Joe Nation ought to be called a "progressive."

photo of PG&E's Pittsburg power plant (now owned by Mirant) in front of a horizon full of SMUD's windmills, courtesy Barbara George of Women's Energy Matters

I’ve been reading through the Marin Clean Energy plan, which is designed to offer customers in 12 potential cities in Marin County the possibility of powering their homes and businesses with 100 percent renewable energy. How can this be, and how can San Francisco do the same?

Their community choice aggregation plan offers folks two options: “light” green (25 percent renewable, ramping up to 50 percent by 2014) or “deep” green (100 percent renewable right out of the gate.) Initially, this will be achieved through power purchase agreements with third-party renewable energy suppliers, while at the same time contracting to build their own renewable power sources and encouraging citizens, through incentives, to put up their own solar panels and wind vanes. (Studies have shown that Marin County has the potential for as much as 846 megawatts of renewables, mostly from solar and wind, though biomass and methane capture are also achievable, especially with all those dairy farms.) The county’s draw is about 240 megawatts.

But my question was if they would still need to rely on natural gas or any other “conventional” power sources as they transition, or to meet peak needs and state-mandated reliability standards.

I queried Tim Rosenfeld, of the Marin Energy Management Team, who has been consulting the county on the plan. “We can’t abandon conventional natural gas generation,” he told me. “It will still be there for firming and shaping our grid, but we will be able to ‘green’ it through our renewable generation.”

With all the understandable concern about global warming lately, we tend to forget that our over-reliance on automobiles also has a more immediate impact: death, lots and lots of death.
Research from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration already shows that traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people ages 3-6 and 8-34, and is the third leading cause of death for all Americans after cancer and heart disease, some of which can also be traced back to the automobile.
Today's Chronicle reports on new research showing that particulate matter, much of it from automobiles, causes far more premature death than previously thought, up to 24,000 annual deaths in California alone. In another piece, the Chron speculates that people might be driving less on Memorial Day weekend, the mother of all road trip holidays, but I still know lots of people who drove down to Lightning in the Bottle and other spots without pausing to consider the externalities.
Yet even after cutting more than $1 billion in transit funding last year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger turned around and did the same thing this year, cuts that would cost the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency $37 million in the coming fiscal year. This isn't just stupid and short-sighted: it's deadly.
But there are countervailing forces fighting back, from a strong local bicycle movement to this fall's high-speed rail bond measure to the international car-free movement, whose biggest annual event, the International Carfree Conference, will be held in Portland next month, the first time it has been in the U.S. And the Guardian will be there (arriving by train) with live daily coverage and interviews with leading thinkers and activists. Stay tuned.

More on why Joe Nation's friends are bad news:

The Mark Leno campaign has done an analysis of the independent expenditure campaigns supporting Nation, and there are some truly nasty bad guys in there. Many of them (for example, our old friends PG&E) gave campoaign cash directly to Nation, then gave more money through the IEs.

Check out the list, taken from a Leno press release:

Civil Justice Association of California (CJAC) $342,544

A group of big oil, insurance, banking, chemical, pharmaceutical companies as well as companies involved in the subprime mortgage meltdown. They were co-sponsors of Proposition 64, which was opposed by consumer and environmental advocates and weakened the general public's ability to pursue lawsuits over unfair business practices and environmental violations. CJAC works to limit their member's liability when lawsuits are brought against them from consumers, patients, workers or environmental advocates.

* Joe Nation took $1,000 from Pacific Gas & Electric Co., CJAC member

* Joe Nation took $3,600 from California Apartment Association, CJAC member

* Joe Nation took $1,000 from the CA Hospital Association, CJAC member

* Joe Nation took $3,600 from MEDPAC of the CA Association of Physician Groups, sponsored by the CA Association of Physicians Organizations Los Angeles, CJAC member

* Joe Nation took $3,200 from the San Francisco Apartment Association, California Apartment Association is a CJAC member

* Joe Nation took $7,200 from the California Real Estate Political Action Committee, CJAC member

Cooperative of American Physicians $100,000

A group that provides liability insurance for it's member physicians and advocates to maintain the liability caps up-held in the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA), which capped their liability in malpractice lawsuits at 1975 levels.

* Joe Nation took $3,600 from Cooperative of American Physicians

Californians Allied for Patient Protection (CAPP) $50,000

A group of corporate hospitals, doctors, insurance companies and others in the medical industry whose priority is to maintain the liability caps up-held in the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA), which capped their liability in malpractice lawsuits at 1975 levels.

* Joe Nation took $3,600 from Californians Allied for Patient Protection

* Joe Nation took $3,600 from MICRA California PAC of NorCal Mutual Insurance Company, member of CAPP

Californians for Jobs and a Strong Economy $3,277

A group of insurance companies, financial-services firms, developers, card clubs and biotechnology companies

I still think it's a two-person race now, with Carole Migden far behind. And I think the best way to stop Nation is to vote for Leno. But whoever you support, don't vote for Nation.

San Francisco celebrated Spanish-speaking cultures over the weekend with fun Carnaval events in the Mission District, and housing activists followed that up by commandeering six billboards and using them to put out messages in Spanish urging voters to reject Prop. 98, which would end rent control and restrictions on conversion of rental properties to condos.
Members of the clandestine coalition who liberated the billboards say immigrants have already had to endure an increase in immigration sweeps and a rising level of anti-immigrant vitriol from the right, so now is the time to fight back against a change in housing laws that would hit low-income immigrants particularly hard.
One member of the coalition who was named, Ruben Salazar, said in a public statement: "What we need now are big, bold reminders shortly before the election to turn out the vote on June 3. Prop 98 is a wolf in sheep's clothing hiding from public attention and sneaking into law during an off-season election. We decided to take over corporate billboards to loudly expose the hidden agenda of Prop 98 and to reclaim the corporate media for community use."

Just as San Francisco voters prepare to cast ballots that will determine whether controversial megdeveloper Lennar covers Candlestick and Hunter's points in 10,000 new homes, the Guardian is being honored for stories that exposed the company's local misdeeds. A series of stories by Sarah Phelan showed how Lennar (with the support of Mayor Gavin Newsom and other high-profile political allies) failed to monitor or control toxic dust at its Parcel A site on Hunter's Point, allegedly retaliated against whistleblowers, and bought off allies in its campaign to avoid accountability for its actions. Phelan's stories are being honored in the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies' prestigious "Investigation Reporting" category, while Guardian coverage of the MediaNews merger and its facilitation by Hearst Corporation (owner of the Chronicle) is a finalist for AAN's first-ever Public Service Award. The project was led by staff writer GW Schulz and was supported by a Guardian lawsuit that made public previously secret corporate documents.
Phelan's stories are also being honored by the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club (at whose June 5 awards banquet finalists will learn whether they won first place or were a runner up), along with stories by three other Guardian writers and editors: Tim Redmond, Steven T. Jones, and Diana Scott.

By Maria Dinzeo
The agenda at Chevron's annual shareholders meeting will be slightly different this year, as representatives from Nigeria, Ecuador, and Burma descend on the meeting to finally have their say. For years, Chevron has been accused of myriad human rights and environmental abuses, from having nonviolent protestors gunned down in Nigeria to the dumping of toxic waste into Amazon waterways in Ecuador.
Tomorrow, representatives from these countries will voice their concerns directly to shareholders and executives. Amazon Watch Director of Communications Simeon Tegel told us the event was designed to "potentially help shareholders become more active" in pressuring Chevron executives to finally address and rectify Chevron's abuses.
"One hopes they are human beings too, although sometimes it's hard to tell. But perhaps they will be motivated to do something, either from pressure from their shareholders or from the kindness of human nature," said Tegel.
Chevron's human rights violations are not limited to abuses abroad. Richmond has long felt the sting of Chevron's environmental negligence, despite the company’s soaring profits. While Chevron promises more energy efficient oil refining methods, they continue to belch toxins into the air over Richmond, and plans for a $1 billion expansion of their Richmond refinery has increased resident's health and safety concerns.
"Change is a long time coming," said Rosi Reyes, spokesperson for the Asian Pacific Environmental Network. "Unfortunately, the citizens of Richmond have read through Chevron's Environmental Impact Report and they feel that there are empty promises. Chevron continues to use equipment that is over 35 years old, and everything in the report points to [Chevron] refining heavier crude oil."
Reyes said that the City of Richmond's aims to wean itself of its oil dependent relationship with Chevron: "We want Chevron to put a cap on crude oil and put money into green energy," she said.
Though contacted repeatedly, Chevron's Media Relations Department was unavailable for comment.
Although Richmond representatives will not be allowed inside the meeting, they hope to confront Chevron executives through their protest outside. Said Amazon Watch spokesman Mitchell Anderson, "[Chevron] may not be listening, but they will definitely hear us tomorrow."

The latest Field Poll results confirm what I and others here at the Guardian have been saying since the California Supreme Court's ruling legalizing same sex marriage came down two weeks ago: this long, divisive fight is basically over in California. Gay and lesbian couples will start getting married in a couple weeks and will likely be able to keep doing so forever, as it should be.
California voters simply won't be willing to write discrimination into the California constitution, particularly after it has now been validated by the high court, the California Legislature (twice), and even gay marriage opponent Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has called for respecting the ruling and said he'll campaign against the fall ballot measure that would outlaw same sex unions.
Those are dynamics that even the best "marriage is between Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" campaign are not going to overcome.

Reuters is reporting that the state of Connecticut today followed San Francisco's lead in suing the McKesson Corp. over an alleged conspiracy to unfairly manipulate the price of prescription drugs. The Connecticut suit charges that McKesson, a multinational corporation based in San Francisco and ranked 18th on the Fortune 500 list, violated anti-racketeering laws by creating a scheme to artificially increase published figures related to what retail pharmacies pay to obtain prescription drugs from wholesalers like McKesson.

The alleged scheme involved the participation of a little-known company based in San Bruno called First DataBank, a subsidiary of media giant Hearst, owner of the San Francisco Chronicle. First DataBank maintains a sophisticated database of prescription drug prices that Medicaid administrators and private insurers use to determine what they'll pay a pharmacy retailer to cover the cost of your drugs after you've made the co-pay.

Because so many prescription drugs exist, First DataBank's figures are critical for understanding the true cost of pharmaceuticals as they move through market pipelines from the manufacturer to the wholesaler to the corner pharmacy. The suits allege that First DataBank and McKesson conspired to inflate those published prices so that everyone from Medi-Cal to Blue Cross paid far more to pharmacies than appropriate for the drugs. A big part of McKesson's business comes from chain pharmacies, and if they saw McKesson going to bat for them, the suits claim, they were likelier to maintain those business relationships instead of turning to a McKesson competitor like AmerisourceBergen or Cardinal Health. Yes this stuff sounds sleep-inducing, but there's a whole lot of money involved if City Attorney Dennis Herrera and others are right about this. Learn more about San Francisco's lawsuit.

I’ve witnessed my share of political rallies, but Prop. F’s “We Shall Not be Moved” event at 3rd Street and Palou in the Bayview takes the bumpin’-block-party prize.

Wedged between three cash checking stores, a beauty parlor, and a T-Third station, the rally was awash with multilingual “Yes on F” signs, edgy urban chic and fighting words.

But beyond the many powerful speakers who showed up to stir up the crowd, the afternoon's three most memorable moments involved song, dance and the spoken word.

Turfaholics’ Johnal performed to a funky remix of “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair).

Prop. F supporters put a smile on the crowd's face with their soulful attempts at the Cha Cha Slide.

And last but not least was hiphop emcee Cobe Obeah

Stay with the following video for a minute and you'll get to the part where Cobe announces that he doesn’t usually cuss, then gets the crowd joining in a “Fuck Lennar!" chant, before delivering a final FU to San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom.

I almost don’t know what to say about Matt Smith’s SF Weekly piece in favor of Prop. 98. I know Smith gets a little unhinged when it comes to housing issues, but his faith in the free market to lower the price of housing in San Francisco – against all odds and all evidence – is just looney.

He starts off with the typical landlord/libertarian argument against rent control, which is that it screws up the marketplace:

Tens of thousands of other apartments are kept off the market through "hoarding," as individual tenants remain in cheap and cavernous three-bedrooms, hang on to their old $200-a-month apartments long after they've moved in with a spouse, or are otherwise motivated to cling to their leases.

Except that Prop. 98 would allow existing tenants to stay in existing rent-controlled apartments, which lose rent control forever when they’re vacated. So the rent-controlled units would be even more valuable, and the incentive to “hoard” even greater. As would be the incentive for landlords to evict long-term tenants.

But wait, there’s more:

Studies also show that rent control discourages construction of new rental apartments New housing construction fell by one third in the seven years after San Francisco's rent control law passed in 1979. During the 1990s, meanwhile, the number of rental units actually decreased by 7,500.

Ah, but all newly constructed units are exempt from rent control anyway. So something else must be going on here. Perhaps the number of rental units decreased because developers, who care nothing for the city’s housing needs, realized there’s more money to be made selling condos. It’s the same reasons Lennar Corp. broke its promise to build rental housing in Hunters Point: There’s more money in selling units right now than in renting them.

And, of course, we’re losing rental housing – not to rent control but to condo conversions, another way property owners can make money.

Smith seems to think that without rent control

“it’s reasonable to surmise … that downtown apartment construction would accelerate. Rents would stabilize or decline. …. Businesses would flock to San Francisco, which would have ample new office space and more, cheaper homes for their employees.”

Sounds idyllic, if you want to live in Manhattan, which I don’t.

In fact, Matt Smith’s vision of a “great city” is by nature one that’s constantly growing and ever-more dense. He berates the urban environmentalists:

San Franciscans replaced what had been a metropolitan vision of the future with one best described as suburban. Rather than being a great city, it would instead be a tranquil place to live.

Matt, you have no sense of history. After World War II, the captains of industry who had completely taken over planning and development policy, in the military model of command and control, to make the West Coast war machine work, decided they liked that way of doing business. So a handful of them sat down and planned the future of the Bay Area. Low-cost South of Market housing would be demolished to make way for hotels and a convention center. Following the suburban model, BART would connect outlying bedroom communities with a dense downtown office core. High-rise buildings would hold the economic center of the Pacific Rim. A network of freeways would cross the city in a Los Angeles-style grid.

That’s what the master planners who Smith lauds had in mind. And the people who lived here decided that it wasn’t fair that nobody asked them about it. So they fought back, cutting off the freeways, down-zoning neighborhoods, fighting over-development (which, by the way, hurts city coffers more than it helps) and trying to keep this a decent place to live.

Rapid growth is not always good, not always desirable. Cities are places where people live, and keeping them livable is a noble pursuit.

And when it comes to housing in a city like San Francisco, the market will never, ever solve the problem. I’ve written about this over and over, but here’s the latest.

Regulation – treating housing not just like a fungible commodity but like a necessity of life that the market can’t fairly provide – is the only way to keep San Francisco affordable.

By Jen Sullivan Brych

What if Jack Kerouac couldn't find a cheap place to crash in San Francisco so he could drink at Vesuvio Café and bang on his typewriter? Would he have been forced to remain in the "sanitarium" of San Luis Obispo, as he referred to it? Would he have been forever missing what a biographer called the "feverish intensities" of San Francisco, never inspired to write again?

Even worse, what if the next generation of Kerouacs and Alice Walkers and Michelle Teas can't afford to live in San Francisco anymore? The frightening Proposition 98 on the June 3 ballot would eliminate all rent control in California. If San Francisco loses rent control, it loses writers and its literary scene.

"If rent control goes, I know I'd lose my apartment soon enough," said writer Peter Orner via email. Orner wrote The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. He was also a Finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award for Esther Stories.

Orner has lived in the Mission for about five years. "They'd replace me with an investment banker in about forty seconds," he said.

So why should people care if writers like Orner leave the city en masse? Richard Florida, University of Toronto business professor and author of the book The Rise of the Creative Class, argues that this group of people is creative, makes good money, and values diversity. The creative class includes writers of all genres, as well as educators, financiers, scientists and techies.

The group is attracted to urban areas like San Francisco, which ranked number one in Florida's creativity rankings for large cities, because of its theater venues, its cafes and spoken word performances, its rock musicians and art galleries; in other words, because of its writers and artists and the quality of life they provide. Florida argues that cities which are successful in attracting this creative class are prospering, while cities that don't are not. So, if rent control vanishes and the writers and artists disappear, our city by the Bay will suffer.

Where in the world is Carmen Policy?

That's what Prop. F supporters are wondering amid the deafening silence that has followed their invite to Lennar consultant and former 49ers president Policy to debate POWER community organizer Alicia Schwartz on Saturday, May 31, in the Bayview.

Back in February 2008, Policy made headlines when he was hired by Lennar executive Kofi Bonner to head what has since become the $3 million Prop. G campaign. That measure primarily involves a land exchange that would allow Lennar to build a new 49ers stadium atop the toxic Hunters Point Shipyard site, while building luxury condos and retail buildings on the former Monster Park site.

Prop. F campaign manager Chris Cassidy says that the Prop. F campaign, which would require 50 percent of all Lennar's housing units to be truly affordable to the folks who currently live in the Bayview, decided to invite Policy to debate Prop. F's Schwartz, "because of the money Policy has received from Lennar and because of his connections to the community from when he was president of the 49ers."

Prop. G's most recent campaign financial disclosures show that $40,915 was paid to Carmen Policy, $343,138 for attorneys' fees, $1.3 million on advertising, and $767,607 on "consulting services."

As Power's Schwartz notes in a Prop. F press release, "Politics can be a contact sport, but it should also be a contest of ideals."

Prop. F organizers say the debate will take place, with or without Policy, at 5030 3rd Street and Quesada Avenue, ( near the MUNI T-Line – Palou Ave. Stop) on Saturday May 31 – 6:30-8:00

Hey, at least Schwartz is challenging Policy to a dance-off...(watch Schwartz, third from left, do the Cha Cha slide).

Turfaholic's Johnel dazzled at a recent Prop. F rally on Palou street in the heart of the Bayview. Stay with it, and you'll get to the part where Johnel sets his own chains a-spinning. Awesome to watch.

As Prop. F supporters continue to liven up their shoestring campaign with dance, debate and rap songs,
yet another huge question is looming over the Prop. G campaign: What is San Francisco going to do about all the glossy Prop. G fliers that are choking up mailboxes citywide?

Since the Lennar-financed Prop. G campaign has already spent over $3.26 million to try and influence the June 3 vote, how about helping find 3.26 million ways to reuse the Prop. G mailers? (ways that don't involve burning them, tempting as that may be, since that would make air quality worse)

We came up with the first three.

1. Wallpaper to cover the mold in your non-luxury dwelling.
2. Materials for your 2008 Halloween costume.
3. A year's supply of bird cage liner.

Photo courtesy of Vegan Reader

Moth spray activists are planning to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge on Saturday, May 31, to protest government plans to spray the Bay Area with moth pheromones.

Folks will gather at 9 am on the San Francisco side in the bridge parking lot, begin their walk at 10 am, and rally at 12 noon at the West End of Crissy Field, between Mason Street and the Marine Sanctuary Visitor Center. (Presumably, no one is going to try the Tibetan monks' stunt of climbing the bridge, this time dressed as Light Brown Apple Moths.) You can find more information about the details of the march, here.

UC Davis scientists continue to challenge the United States Department of Agriculture and the California Department of Agriculture's claims that the moth poses a severe threat to agriculture and that the aerial pesticides will effectively eradicate the pest.

But the CDFA is fighting back.

In a recent press release, the CDFA claimed that "aerially-applied moth pheromones have been used around the world for more than a decade with no indication of harm to people, pets or plants."

"To date, the only impact on the environment or living things is confusion in male moths looking to mate with females," CDFA officials claim.

What are you doing after work tomorrow? Critical Mass? The Alterna-Mass that all the cool bikers are talking about? Maybe a happy hour somewhere, or heading home to get dolled up for the Bohemian Carnival?
Hey, how about the Market-Octavia Plan Party?
-- cue the crickets --
OK, OK, maybe a party to mark the successful end of the years-long process to create and win political approval for a new Market & Octavia Neighborhood Plan is something that only a policy wonk can get excited about. But it is a very San Francisco type of plan, creating strict limits on new parking, good affordable housing incentives, and design standards promoting walkability. As plan participant and party promoter Jason Henderson said, "This is the plan that sets the precedent for a more sustainable, car-lite future for San Francisco."
Not doing it for you? Try this quote from the party invite: "Munchies and partial hosted bar." Better? It's also at the Rickshaw Stop, the coolest bar in Hayes Valley, from 5:30-9:30. And it will feature speeches by Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, Planning Commission President Christina Olague and lots of others who helped bring this baby home.
So come on down...if you're into that sort of thing.

It’s not like schools are their business – at all. But the $13 billion utility company is the big money behind recent television ads depicting Mark Leno as a foe of children and schools.

“San Francisco Assemblyman Mark Leno claims that he’s for better schools,” the ad informs, according to a transcript provided by the California Teacher’s Association. “Yet in 2004, it was Leno who joined Republicans, and with one vote to spare, cut $3.1 billion from California schools.”

Actually, said CTA in a news release, “It distorts Leno’s support for a state budget in 2004 that temporarily reduced some funding for schools. The budget was approved by the Legislature with bipartisan support in that financially difficult year for the state.”

CTA, which represents 90 percent of the state’s educators, endorsed Leno in the District 3 State Senate race, and held a rally today in Mill Valley to affirm their support and criticize PG&E.

“Why is PG&E behind this?” CTA’s Mike Myslinski wondered when we spoke to him. “Leno has a strong education record and parents and teachers are very disturbed by this ad.”

The ad was attributed to a political action committee called “Protect Our Kids,” which late independent expenditure filings [PDF] with the CA Secretary of State show is heavily funded by CALIFORNIANS FOR A CLEAN ENERGY FUTURE, A COALITION OF ENVIRONMENTALISTS, TAXPAYERS, AND PACIFIC GAS AND ELECTRIC COMPANY. [PDF]

Looks like the San Francisco Police Officers Association, as well as a couple of out of state companies, also kicked in to cover the $100,000 in cash that’s been spent on anti-Leno propaganda that has nothing to do with energy – clean or otherwise. But, as CTA points out, "The PG&E-funded ad comes at a time when one of Leno’s opponents in the Senate race, Joe Nation, is being criticized for his huge financial support from business interests. PG&E is a supporter of Nation."

It wasn't all that long ago Leno was shaking hands with PG&E over at the LGBT center.

It’s 4 PM on a Friday afternoon, that hour when most employees are counting the seconds to the weekend—and wishing that Monday morning wasn’t only 65 hours away.

But does the Mayor’s Office know what time it is?

And if so, why have we only just found out that Mayor Gavin Newsom is planning to make his Monday morning budget announcement, at 10: 30 am, June 2, at the Hunters Point Shipyard?

The announcement will be made at
View Larger Map">606 Hunter's Point Shipyard.
(Unless, Newsom is planning a repeat of his disappearing Olympic Torch stunt.)

The location happens to be the San Francisco Police Department's Tactical Operations center. Press are being asked to present press credentials for entry.

Could it be that this announcement is being made at the very last minute because the choice of location gives Newsom the appearance of impropriety? Newsom backing Prop.G on the June 3 ballot, the measure that developer Lennar has spent over $3.5 million in an effort to grab even more of San Francisco’s waterfront real estate, adding highly desirable land at Candlestick Point to the shipyard's wastelands, so it can develop even more luxury condos?

Or could it be because he didn’t want to tip of supporters of Prop. F, the competing measure on the June 3 ballot that requires that 50 percent of development in the Bayview is affordable to people who actually live there—households that tend to make $68,000 and under and can't afford to buy $500,000 condos and million-dollar townhouses?

Whatever the reasons, the running dogs of the press weren’t the only ones left in the dark about the budget locale.

No one on the Board of Supervisors was informed until 4PM, Friday afternoon, either. That's when a mayoral aide came by the office of Sup. Ross Mirkarimi, who sits on the Board’s Budget and Finance Committee, to deliver the news of this hitherto top secret location.

Normally, Board members get an invitation at least 10-14 days beforehand.

Mirkarimi calls the move “highly unorthodox and outrageous.”

“What’s really unforgivable is that we are facing the worst budget deficit in San Francisco’s history,” Mirkarimi said. “The Mayor needs to be fostering collaboration, and enlisting the support of everyone he can, especially those who have influence on the budget process. It’s unfortunate that the casualty in all this is our desire to work together.”

Nancy Pelosi with Paul Ash, executive director of the San Francisco Food Bank. Photo by Steven T. Jones

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi toured the San Francisco Food Bank today to highlight her concern with rising food costs and the need for a reordering of national priorities to address poverty. But she also showed how her party's cautious approach to the issue has contributed to the grim reality that one in four San Francisco children are at risk of hunger.
"It's an unthinkable notion that any child in the U.S. can go hungry," Pelosi told the crowd of volunteers, care providers, politicos and journalists. She also stressed, "It's important that we think of it one person at a time, or as I think of it as one child at a time," peppering her address regularly with Biblical calls to feed the hungry. Personally, I would have rather heard an admission of how Congress helped oversee an unconscionable consolidation of wealth and how she plans to redistribute it to the families of these poor hungry kids.
Pelosi touted this year's omnibus farm bill for new spending on nutrition and ethanol production, food safety improvements, and reductions in subsidies to corporate agri-business, a bipartisan bill that overcame a Bush veto. But many in the Bay Area's growing food movement criticized the bill as basically business as usual, ignoring evidence that demonstrates the importance of moving from our heavily subsidized, industrial food production system to more local and sustainable models, criticism that I asked her about at the event.
Pelosi responded that, "I associate myself with the concerns that you represented," noting that she signaled to Washington DC power brokers that this is the last farm bill that will so heavily subsidize big business. She would have hoped to do so this year -- rather than three years from now when this bill expires -- but that, "It was harder than I had hoped to go cold turkey."
Similarly, she blasted President Bush with both barrels, particularly for the Iraq War and tax cuts on the wealthy, saying "The last eight years of the Bush Administration have done great harm to this country."
Yet despite acknowledging this "grotesque mistake" of an Iraq War was sold with lies, and that top officials have violated the constitution, Pelosi has been unwilling to pursue impeachment or anything substantial to hold those officials accountable. But she is willing to intervene in the current presidential race to end the fight by next week and avoid letting it be worked out in August at the convention.
"I think if we take this to the convention, it will harm our chances in November," Pelosi said, drawing her biggest applause of the morning.

Just so it's clear: The Bay Guardian doesn't send out slate cards. We don't do door hangers. We don't produce campaign mail. Ever. Period.

But just about every election, somebody we endorsed, or some group that agrees with us, reprints the Guardian endorsements, makes fliers out of them and sends or hands them around. That's fine with me -- we're happy to get the word out. And even if it weren't fine with me, there's not a whole lot I could do about it -- our endorsements are public, and there's nothing wrong with senidng around fliers saying the Guardian endorsed these candidates.

And in the 25 years I've been working here, I've never seen anyone try to do something sleazy like use the Guardian logo to promote a candidate we didn't actually endorse. Until now.

I've just learned that there's a slate card going around with our logo on it and an endorsement of Carole Migden for state Senate. That's wrong. We didn't endorse Migden. We went with Mark Leno. A lot of my progressive friends disagreed with that decision, and I respect their opinions. This was a tough one, and there are good people on both sides. And until today, I was pretty impressed with how both Migden and Leno had been trying to keep the focus on their own strengths, and instead of attacking each other have pointed out that the real danger here is the possibility that Joe Nation will wind up winning.

And then this.

I've gotten calls all afternoon about it. Voters are confused; they have a mailer saying we've endorsed Leno, and one that appears to say we've endorsed Migden. The language on the Migden card is written carefully, and if you read all the fine print, you can figure out that it never actually says the Guardian is backing Migden. But very few people read or get the fine points; they see a slate card with a Guardian logo and a picture of Migden, and they think we endorsed her.

That's not right. Whatever you think of our endorsements, this is misleading. It's a trick on the voters, using our name, and I don't appreciate it.

I called Sup. Chris Daly, who was behind the card, tonight and told him how unhappy I was, and he said he didn't care. "I'm unhappy, too," he said. "You endorsed Mark Leno, who is not a progressive."

Okay, we can argue that forever, but it's not the point. It's not cool to use the Guardian logo and (I hope) good name and reputation to confuse the voters.

Again, for anyhone who missed the point: We endorsed Mark Leno for state Senate. One of the reasons we made that decision is that we found Migden's ethical conduct, particularly when it came to campaign money, highly suspect. We don't like political sleaze. And this is just the kind of shit we hate to see in the progressive movement.

Our endorsements are here. Use this slate; it's the real one.